The present invention relates to processing techniques for multifunction peripherals (MFPs). More particularly, the present invention relates to systems and methods for paper based input to an MFP and the automated completion of forms.
It is common for users to be presented with multiple forms which request the same information. For example, in the case of a loan applicant, a mortgage broker may request multiple forms on behalf of different banks and government agencies to be filled out. Similarly, in the case of registration for a child at the school there may be a “registration form” for the local school, an almost equivalent “registration form” for the school district, an emergency contact form, and a release form for extra-circular activities, etc. Each form is likely to be formatted differently but contains many fields requesting the same information, e.g. name, address, social security number, phone numbers and employer name. The human user filling out the forms, hereafter referred to as the user, is required to waste time writing exactly the same information on multiple forms. Besides being inefficient, it is also frustrating to the user and leads to user leaving fields blank, use of excessive abbreviation, or increasingly poor hand writing, thus ultimately causing extra work for the form receiver and processor.
Various systems have been devised for automatic completion of electronic forms. For example, there are a variety of document management products that exist. These products are designed to assist with forms processing. These products allow blank forms to be scanned and identified. Fields from the blank form may be manually identified, named, and even have a type assigned, e.g. a numerical field. The products require the creation of a database to store information about the position of fields on the blank form and contents for each field. Some of these products are integrated with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems and provide Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs) for the correction of errors. Some products allow the newly recognized form to be printed or emailed or made accessible on the intranet or internet via a web interface. However, these products are designed to get information into a central database. These systems do not store the written information on the form but rather attempt to process it so that it can be converted to text and stored in the database. When provisions for helping the user exist, the user must interact with the electronic representations of the form, not paper.
Electronic forms are available in a variety of forms in the prior art including HTML, XML, PDF, and word processing formats. Browsers for HTML and XML forms provide automatic completion of form fields by matching the name of the field with the name of previous fields that have been filled in by the form filler. Unlike the present invention, these electronic form auto-completion systems universally require a display, keyboard or mouse input, and accept only symbolic input i.e. keyboard characters. Further these systems often pose a privacy or security threat because they save potentially sensitive information from the user for an unknown amount of time and unknown locations. For example, another user using the same device to fill out the same or different form may be shown the data entered by a previous user, including basic information such as the user's name as well as more sensitive information such as the user's social security number. Thus, there are significant security issues with such auto-fill functionality as well as a requirement that the data be keyed in by the user.